Background

In October
1949 after the defeat of the Kuomintang,
the Chinese Communist Party proclaimed the establishment of the
People's
Republic of China. Immediately, landlords and wealthier
peasants had their land holdings forcibly redistributed to poorer
peasants. In the agricultural sectors, crops deemed by the Party to
be "full of evil" such as the opium crop, were destroyed and
replaced with crops such as rice. Within the Party, there was major
debate about redistribution. A moderate faction within the party
and Politburo member
Liu Shaoqi argued that change should be
gradual and any collectivisation of
the peasantry should wait until industrialization, which could
provide the agricultural machinery for mechanized farming. A more
radical faction led by Mao Zedong agreed
that the best way to finance industrialization was for the
Government to take control of agriculture, thereby establishing a
monopoly over grain distribution and supply. This would allow the
State to buy at a low price and sell much higher, thus raising the
capital necessary for the industrialization of the country.It was
realized that this policy would be unpopular with the peasants and
therefore it was proposed that the peasants should be brought under
Party control by the establishment of agricultural collectives
which would also facilitate the sharing of tools and draft animals.
This policy was gradually pushed through between 1949 and 1958,
first by establishing "mutual aid teams" of 5-15 households, then
in 1953 "elementary agricultural cooperatives" of 20-40 households,
then from 1956 in "higher co-operatives" of 100-300 families. These
reforms (sometimes now referred to as The Great Leap
Forward) were generally unpopular with the peasants and
usually implemented by summoning them to meetings and making them
stay there for days and sometimes weeks until they "voluntarily"
agreed to join the collective.

Besides these economic changes, the Party implemented major social
changes in the countryside including the banishing of all religious
and mystic institutions and ceremonies and replacing them with
political meetings and propaganda sessions. Attempts were made to
enhance rural education and the status of women (allowing females
to initiate divorce if they desired) and ending foot-binding, child
marriage and opium addiction. Internal
passports were introduced in 1956 forbidding travel without
appropriate authorisation. Highest priority was given to the urban
proletariat for whom a welfare state was
created.

In 1957 Mao responded to the tensions in the Party by promoting
free speech and criticism under the 100 Flowers Campaign. In
retrospect, some have come to argue that this was a ploy to allow
critics of the regime, primarily intellectuals but also low ranking
members of the party critical of the agricultural policies, to
identify themselves. Some claim that Mao simply swung to the side
of the hard-liners once his policies gained strong opposition. Once
he had done so, at least half a million were purged under the
Anti-Rightist campaign
organised by Deng Xiaoping, which
effectively silenced any opposition from within the Party or from
agricultural experts to the changes which would be implemented
under the Great Leap Forward.

By the completion of the first 5 Year Economic Plan in 1957, Mao
had come to doubt that the path to socialism that had been taken by
the Soviet Union was appropriate for China. He was critical of
Khrushchev's reversal of Stalinist policies and alarmed by the
uprisings that had taken place in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the
perception that the USSR was seeking "Peaceful coexistence" with the Western
powers. Mao had become convinced that China should follow
its own path to Communism.

The Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward was the name given to the Second Five Year
Plan which was scheduled to run from 1958–1963, though the name is
now generally limited to the first three years of this period.
Mao
unveiled the Great Leap Forward at a meeting in January 1958 in
Nanjing. The central idea behind the Great Leap was
that rapid development of China's agricultural and industrial
sectors should take place in parallel. The hope was to
industrialize by making use of the massive supply of cheap labour
and avoid having to import heavy machinery. To achieve this, Mao
advocated that a further round of collectivisation modelled on the USSR's "Third Period" was
necessary in the Chinese countryside where the existing collectives
would be merged into huge People's
Communes.An experimental commune was established at
Chayashan in Henan in April
1958. Here for the first time private plots were entirely
abolished and communal kitchens were introduced. At the Politburo
meetings in August 1958, it was decided that these people's
communes would become the new form of economic and political
organization throughout rural China. Astonishingly for such a
dramatic social change, by the end of the year approximately 25,000
communes had been set up, with an average of 5,000 households each.
The communes were relatively self sufficient co-operatives where
wages and money were replaced by work points. Besides agriculture
they incorporated some light industry and construction
projects.

Mao saw grain and steel production as the key pillars of economic
development. He forecast that within 15 years of the start
of the Great Leap, China's steel production
would surpass that of the UK. In
the August 1958 Politburo meetings, it was decidedthat steel
production would be set to double within the year, most of the
increase coming through backyard steel furnaces. Mao was shown an
example of a backyard furnace in Hefei, Anhui in September
1958 by provincial first secretary Zeng Xisheng . The unit
was claimed to be manufacturing high quality steel (though in fact
the finished steel had probably been manufactured elsewhere).

With no personal knowledge of metallurgy,
Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune
and in each urban neighborhood. Huge efforts on the part of
peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap
metal. To fuel the furnaces the local environment was denuded of
trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants'
houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to
supply the "scrap" for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic
production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural
workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production
as were the workers at many factories, schools and even hospitals.
Although the output consisted of low quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth,
Mao had a deep distrust of intellectuals and faith in the power of
the mass mobilization of the peasants. Moreover, the experience of
the intellectual classes following the Hundred Flowers Campaign silenced
those aware of the folly of such a plan. According to his private
doctor, Li Zhisui, Mao and his entourage
visited traditional steel works in Manchuria in January 1959 where he found out that
high quality steel could only be produced in large scale factories
using reliable fuel such as coal. However, he decided not to order
a halt to the backyard steel furnaces so as not to dampen the
revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses. The program was only
quietly abandoned much later in that year.

Substantial effort was expended during the Great Leap Forward on
large-scale, but often on poorly planned capital construction
projects, such as irrigation works often
built without input from trained engineers.

Chinese propaganda poster showing
larger-than-human melon

On the communes, a number of radical and controversial agricultural
innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao. Many of these were
based on the ideas of now discredited Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko and his followers. The
policies included close cropping, whereby seeds were sown far more
densely than normal on the incorrect assumption that seeds of the
same class would not compete with each other. Deep plowing (up to
2m deep) was encouraged on the mistaken belief that this would
yield plants with extra large root systems. Moderately productive
land was left unplanted with the belief that concentrating manure
and effort on the most fertile land would lead to large per-acre
productivity gains. Altogether, these untested innovations
generally led to decreases in grain production rather than
increases.

Meanwhile, local leaders were pressured into falsely reporting
ever-higher grain production figures to their political superiors.
Participants at political meetings remembered production figures
being inflated up to 10 times actual production amounts as the race
to please superiors and win plaudits – like the chance to meet Mao
himself – intensified. The state was later able to force many
production groups to sell more grain than they could spare based on
these false production figures.

The initial impact of the Great Leap Forward was discussed at the
Lushan Conference in July/August
1959. Although many of the more moderate leaders had reservations
about the new policy, the only senior leader to speak out openly
was Marshall Peng Dehuai. Mao used the
conference to dismiss Peng from his post as Defence Minister and
denounce both Peng (who in fact came from a poor peasant family)
and his supporters as bourgeois and launch a nationwide campaign
against "rightist opportunism". Peng was replaced by Lin Biao, who began a systematic purge of Peng's
supporters from the military.

Climate conditions and famine

Despite these harmful agricultural innovations, the weather in 1958
was very favorable and the harvest promised to be good.
Unfortunately, the amount of labour diverted to steel production
and construction projects meant that much of the harvest was left
to rot uncollected in some areas. This problem was exacerbated by a
devastating locust swarm, which was caused
when their natural predators were killed as part of the Great Sparrow Campaign. Although
actual harvests were reduced, local officials, under tremendous
pressure from central authorities to report record harvests in
response to the new innovations, competed with each other to
announce increasingly exaggerated results. These were used as a
basis for determining the amount of grain to be taken by the State
to supply the towns and cities, and to export. This left barely
enough for the peasants, and in some areas, starvation set in.
During 1958–1960 China continued to be a substantial net exporter
of grain, despite the widespread famine experienced in the
countryside, as Mao sought to maintain face and convince the
outside world of the success of his plans.

In 1959 and 1960 the weather was less favorable, and the situation
got considerably worse, with many of China's provinces experiencing
severe famine. Droughts, floods, and general bad weather caught
China completely by surprise. In July 1959, the Yellow Riverflooded in East
China. According to the Disaster Center , it directly
killed, either through starvation from crop failure or drowning, an
estimated 2 million people.

In 1960, at least some degree of drought and other bad weather
affected 55 percent of cultivated land, while an estimated 60
percent of northern agricultural land received no rain at all
.

With dramatically reduced yields, even urban areas suffered much
reduced rations; however, mass starvation was largely confined to
the countryside, where, as a result of massively inflated
production statistics, very little grain was left for the peasants
to eat. Food shortages were bad throughout the
country; however, the provinces which had adopted Mao's reforms
with the most vigor, such as Anhui, Gansu and Henan, tended to
suffer disproportionately.Sichuan, one of China's most populous provinces, known in
China as "Heaven's Granary" because of its fertility, is thought to
have suffered the greatest absolute numbers of deaths from
starvation due to the vigor with which provincial leader Li Jinquan
undertook Mao's reforms. During the Great Leap Forward,
cases of cannibalism also occurred in
the parts of China that were severely affected by drought and
famine.

The agricultural policies of the Great Leap Forward and the
associated famine would then continue until January 1961, where, at
the Ninth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee, the restoration
of agricultural production through a reversal of the Great Leap
policies was started. Grain exports were stopped, and imports from
Canada and Australia helped to reduce the impact of the food
shortages, at least in the coastal cities.

Consequences

Ironic considering its name, the Great Leap Forward is now widely
seen, both within China and outside, as a major economic disaster, effectively being a
"Great Leap Backward" that would affect China in the years to come.
As inflated statistics reached planning authorities, orders were
given to divert human resources into
industry rather than agriculture. The official toll of excess deaths
recorded in China for the years of the GLF is 14 million, but
scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between
20 and 43 million Peng Xizhe (彭希哲), "Demographic Consequences of
the Great Leap Forward in China's Provinces," Population and
Development Review 13, no. 4 (1987), 639-70.
For a summary of other estimates, please refer to this link.

The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three
Bitter Years" and the Three Years of Natural
Disasters. Many local officials were tried and publicly
executed for giving out misinformation.

Starting in the early 1980s, critics of the Great Leap added
quantitative muscle to their arsenal. U.S.Government employee Judith Banister published what became an
influential article in the China
Quarterly, and since then estimates as high as 30 million
deaths in the Great Leap became common in the U.S. press. However, Wim F
Wertheim, emeritus professor from the University
of Amsterdam, disagrees with the numbers presented on the basis
that they lack scientific support.. Critics of this position
point to the numerous studies by individuals such as Aird in 1982,
Ashton et al. in 1984, and Peng in 1987 that specifically sought to
quantify the Great Leap's demographic impact. A lingering problem
that all scholars point to is the assumptions regarding birth rate
used in the most widely cited projections of famine deaths. These
assumptions make it difficult to precisely gauge the death toll
with a high degree of accuracy.

Dr Ping-ti Ho, professor of history at the University of Chicago,
and an expert in Chinese Demography in a book titled Studies on
the Population of China, 1368-1953 (Harvard East Asian Studies
No 4, 1959), also mentioned numerous flaws in the 1953 census on
which famine death projections are made, though acknowledging the
lack of more accurate sources.

Critics of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's book Mao: The Unknown Story often
cite these studies as evidence that their body count (38 million)
may be exaggerated. However, one authoritative account of the
famine, a 1,100 page study by Yang
Jisheng, a long time communist party member and a reporter for
the official Chinese news agency Xinhua, puts the
number of deaths from the Great
Chinese Famine at 36 million. His book, entitled
Tombstone, challenges the official Communist Party line
that the famine was largely a result of "Three Years of Natural
Disasters" and puts the blame squarely on Maoist policies, such as diverting agricultural
workers to steel production instead of growing crops, and exporting
grain at the same time.

Yang
notes that local party officials were indifferent to the large
number of people dying around them, as their primary concern was
the delivery of grain, which Mao wanted to use to pay back debts to
the USSR totaling
1.973 billion yuan.In Xinyang, people died of starvation at the doors of grain
warehouses. Mao refused to open the state granaries as he
dismissed reports of food shortages and accused the peasants of
hiding grain.

Like in the USSR during the famine of 1932-33,
peasants were confined to their starving villages by a system of
household registration, and the worst effects of the famine were
directed against enemies of the regime. Those labeled as "black
elements" (religious leaders, rightists, rich peasants, etc.) in
any previous campaign were given the lowest priority in the
allocation of food, and therefore died in the greatest
numbers.

Not all of the deaths during the Great Leap were from starvation,
as many were tortured and killed by communist officials for failing
to meet grain quotas.

During the Great Leap, the Chinese economy initially grew. Iron
production increased 45% in 1958 and a combined 30% over the next
two years, but plummeted in 1961, and did not reach the previous
1958 level until 1964.

Despite the risks to their careers, some Communist Party members
openly laid blame for the disaster at the feet of the Party
leadership and took it as proof that China must rely more on
education, acquiring technical expertise
and applying bourgeois methods in
developing the economy. Liu Shaoqi made a speech in 1962 at Seven
Thousand Man's Assembly criticizing that "The economic disaster was
30% fault of nature, 70% human error."

Mao stepped down as State Chairman of the PRC in 1959, predicting
he would take most of the blame for the failure of the Great Leap
Forward, though he did retain his position as Chairman of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Liu Shaoqi
(the new PRC Chairman) and Deng
Xiaoping (CCP General Secretary) were left in charge to execute
measures to achieve economic recovery. Moreover, Mao's Great
Leap Forward policy came under open criticism at a party conference
at the Lushan Conference in
Jiangxi. The attack was led by Minister of National
Defense Peng Dehuai, who had become
troubled by the potentially adverse effect Mao's policies would
have on the modernization of the armed forces. Peng argued that
"putting politics in command" was no substitute for economic laws
and realistic economic policy; unnamed party leaders were also
admonished for trying to "jump into communism in one step." After
the Lushan showdown, Peng Dehuai, who allegedly had been encouraged
by Nikita Khrushchev to oppose
Mao, was deposed. Peng was replaced by Lin
Biao.

Additionally, this loss in Mao's regime meant that Mao became a
"dead ancestor," as he labeled himself: a person who was respected
but never consulted, occupying the political background of the
Party. Furthermore, he also stopped appearing in public. All of
this he later regretted, as he relaunched his cult of personality with the Great Yangtze Swim.

In agrarian policy, the failures of food supply during the Great
Leap were met by a gradual de-collectivization in the 1960s that
foreshadowed further de-collectivization under Deng Xiaoping.
Political scientist Meredith
Jung-En Woo argues: "Unquestionably the regime failed to
respond in time to save the lives of millions of peasants, but when
it did respond, it ultimately transformed the livelihoods of
several hundred million peasants (modestly in the early 1960s, but
permanently after Deng Xiaoping's reforms subsequent to
1978.)"

After the death of Mao and the start of Chinese
economic reform under Deng
Xiaoping, the tendency within the Chinese government was to see
the Great Leap Forward as a major economic disaster and to
attribute it to the cult of
personality under Mao Zedong, and to regard it as one of the
serious errors he made after the founding of the PRC.